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grunge

It is an irrefutable truth when considering any Melvins album that one of the only ways to appropriately discuss the music is to reflexively use the band’s name as an adjective. The Melvins, some twenty years after Kurt Cobain made them a musical household name, have carved themselves an undeniable niche that is populated solely by Buzz Osborne and his band. No one else sounds like this; no one can even being to capture the “throw it all out there and see what takes” attitude and creativity of King Buzzo.

Following “Down On the Upside,” an album that was met with critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination for single “Pretty Noose,” Soundgarden walked away in the face of flagging sales. It was a disheartening announcement that the band was done; they clearly had the talent and desire, but no longer felt the warm embrace of relevancy in a world that had evolved past the flannelled angst of grunge.

Normally, greatest hits albums, whether they're masked as "career retrospectives" or some other convoluted term, go unnoticed by me. I remember coming to the conclusion at a younger age that most greatest hits albums are simply shams by record labels to perpetuate sales of a band that might have gone stale. This was the principle reason that Soundgarden's "A-Sides" release in 1997 garnered no interest from me, even though it contained the previously unreleased (and pretty solid) track "Bleed Together."

The set began tentatively, like it was the band’s very first time on stage all over again. Each note was practiced and perfectly placed, each band member was nervously dreading any mistake that might set the crowd against them.